This dissertation investigates the expression of the indirect evidential subdomain in two languages in contact, i.e. the northern variety of Central Aymara and the variety of Spanish spoken in La Paz (Bolivia).

For this aim, the study uses first-hand data collected in La Paz and El Alto (Bolivia) during 2014 and 2015. Data was elicited through: the “Family Problems Picture” task (San Roque et al. 2012), formulated by the members of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and created specifically for the activation of cognitive categories such as evidentiality and mirativity; the “Pear Story” designed for Wallace Chafe, professor at the University of California, to collect narrative texts that show how humans perceive, elaborate and verbalize experience; and, finally, personal narratives, traditional narratives and interviews. Thirty-three recordings (12h 48’) of 48 Spanish-Aymara bilingual speakers (17 males, age range: 18-64) were fully transcribed and annotated. The resulting corpus consists of 33 transcriptions of which 14 are in Aymara (c. 19 154 words), whereas 19 are in Spanish (c. 46 245 words).

The dissertation is built around four research questions.

First, the dissertation shows the functions of the forms identified in the data in both languages. The study identifies for each form both evidential and non-evidential functions. Indirect evidential functions are systematically analyzed and classified by combining Willett’s (1988) and Aikhnvald’s (2004) classifications. The analysis shows evidential functions of forms that have not been previously studied as such, i.e. digamos and diciendo in Spanish and sañani and sapxi in Aymara, but it also reveals unnoticed evidential functions for previously described forms.

Second, the dissertation provides a clear view of the relationship between the evidential and the epistemic modal domain involved in the use of the forms identified. Two types of correlation are found. Both languages, indeed, show forms that only point out the way in which speakers acquired information and forms where the two domains overlap.

Third, the dissertation investigates speakers’ epistemic stance, in terms of commitment, towards information involved in the use of the evidential forms identified. The study shows that the forms which convey merely evidential information express mainly a medium-high commitment degree, whereas the forms in which the distinction between the evidential and the epistemic modal domain is blurred indicate a low degree of commitment.

Forth, the dissertation sheds light on the relationship between the expressions of the indirect evidential subdomain in the two languages. The study proposes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the evidential types and subtypes in both languages. The results show a high degree of convergence between the two languages, suggesting also situations of influence of one language on the other.

Presentation of Gregory the Great in medieval Piacenza, regarding liturgical veneration in mass and divine office, the various texts of Gregory's used in the liturgy (mainly his homilies), and the manuscripts containing texts of Gregory in Biblioteca Capitolare.

This paper argues that the theoretical-analytical proposal in Michel Foucault’s works on governmentality and pastoralism, can be applied to the study of politics and religions in Latin America. Taking into account Foucault’ original pastoralism and the colonial context that he did not observe, it can be argued that the colonial Catholic regime that operated from the 16th to the 19th centuries in Latin America developed a series of techno-logies (techniques and logics) for the government of individuals and populations. Questions on whether these technologies have persisted or not in the level of governmentalities in different regions of Latin America will be preliminarily answered in this text. In doing so, theoretical and methodological criteria to adopt critically Foucault’s perspective will be presented. Such a critical adaptation of the latter is proposed as a contribution to the debates on religions and government in Latin America and the larger debates on religions and politics in the 21st-century global(ized) societies.

Within the next pages, I will point out how ingenium became the column on which the poetic imagery of the Renaissance and the Baroque rested, remarking, likewise, how through the exercise of this human faculty the Early Modern poetic imagery developed into a more conceptual, symbolic, obscure, rhetorical and artificial one. In order to do this, I will show the importance of Góngora as the main transforming poet of that transitional epoch for aesthetics and thought.

Invited to Constantinople in the 1160’ies by the emperor Manuel I Komnenos to present the Western view on the Trinity in the so-called Demetrius of Lampe affair, the Italian theologian and diplomat Hugo Eterianus took part in the dogmatic discussions on the relation between the Father and the Son. Afterwards Hugo composed De sancto et immortali Deo to present the dogmatics of the Western church in both Greek and Latin, and sent the opus to pope Alexander in Rome and to the patriarch in Antioch. The accompanying letters and well as the treatise itself contain a number of attacks on the Greek theologians of the Byzantine period.

During the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy in the mid-1940s, Sweden experienced a heated debate on economic planning in which a number of Sweden's leading economists were involved. In 1941, Ingvar Svennilson, a member of the so-called Stockholm school of economists, became the head of the Industrial Institute of Economic and Social Research, founded by Swedish industry. During the following years he wrote extensively on the issue of economic planning. Although this issue was ideologically explosive, he managed to strike a balance which earned him respect in most camps. His focus gradually shifted from central planning during the war, toward framework planning and indicative planning after the war, when he designed the first Swedish long-term survey.

This chapter illuminates how accountability is a core aspect of the intergenerational argumentation by family members during social interaction at dinnertime. First, an introduction to the concepts of social accountability and language socialization will be provided. Some prior work has focused on mutual apprenticeship (Pontecorvo, Fasulo & Sterponi, 2001), but not much work has problematized how children deploy what we will call proto-accounts (laments, multiple repeats, want-statements) on the one hand, and varied verbal accounts, on the other, in relation to age class or prior language socialization experiences. Second, we will present our study on argumentation, exploring how children’s accounts work during family dinner conversations. Argumentative resources used by parents and children will be discussed in the final part of the chapter in terms of social accountability and the relevance that these strategies have as truly interactional accomplishments.

The present paper deals with methodological aspects of Italian quantitative sociolinguistic research. It discusses a number of projects, showing the increasing vitality of this approach, which, despite being rooted in international mainstream research, displays considerable scientific novelty. Special attention is paid to the projects carried out by the Centre d'Etudes Linguistiques pour l'Europe (Milan), the Free University of Bozen/ Bolzano and the research group of the Atlante linguistico della Sicilia at the CSFLS. Within these projects the quantitative sociolinguistic approach is discussed in depth. New means of discussing the data are explored that go beyond their mere statistical presentation and offer ways of interpreting the linguistic reality of multilingual situations without the bias of possible previous assumptions by the researcher. Italian quantitative projects comprise large sociolinguistic polls conducted throughout Europe as well as more focused studies on specific multilingual situations. Particular attention will be given to the treatment of sociolinguistic data at both macro and micro levels of analysis. It will be shown that in Italian research, quantitative sociolinguistics always goes hand in hand with qualitative and dialectal research.

Sweden, a literary model in the process of autonomy? The import issues of French language literature in Sweden in XXI century

This study offers an in-depth analysis of the reception in the Swedish daily press (2010–2014) of three Francophone authors: Crowther, Taïa, and Thúy. Through a new approach combining concepts like consecrational transfers (Casanova), cultural transfer (Espagne), and ideologic functions (Moura), the analysis reveals Sweden’s efforts to become a consecrating pole. Firstly, while stressing the “difference” as a principal feature of the commented literature, Sweden tries to foreground its own national project to jointly promote diversity, migrancy and cohesion. Secondly, comparing the Francophone literature with its own, Swedish critics manage to consecrate literature from another dominated country. Finally, comparisons with more international references leave space for self-consecration and access to a more dominant position on the market. Thus, the transmitted literature is less at stake than the receiving country’s own image.

The purpose of the present thesis is to examine the modes of enunciation (“mode d’énonciation”) and the use of text genres in relation to thematic and semantic aspects of Claude Cahun’s book, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals: or, Cancelled Confessions)(1930), which consists of text fragments. Claude Cahun, who is mostly known for her photographic self-portraits, was active on the margins of surrealism in Paris in the 1920s. The text fragments of Aveux non avenus can be compared to a collage technique that she also uses in the photomontages which open each chapter of the book. As an author, Claude Cahun clearly resisted traditional confessional literature (as the title of the book also suggests), and this study focuses on how she creates images of herself through characters borrowed from mythology, the Bible, and popular and literary texts, but also through reflections on specific themes in dialogues, essays and aphorisms.

The thesis examines how Aveux non avenus differs from an actual autobiography, how the fragmented self-portrait is constructed, and how the book expresses a critique of contemporary society. The method of the thesis is based on textual analysis, with the support of the concepts of modes of enunciation (”mode d’énonciation”), text genres, and détournement (”détournement”). It also rests on the contextualisation of Claude Cahun’s practice of writing in relation to the history of literary genres, surrealist avant-garde movement, and in relation to sources within cultural history and the history of women.

The thesis analyses how Claude Cahun, through the use of different genres and shifting modes of enunciation, creates a fragmented, diverse, and contradictory portrait of herself, in a way that also conveys a critical image of contemporary society. The text functions, simultaneously, as a collage of different text genres. The conclusion thereby underlines the idea that the text is not arbitrarily fragmentary, but constructed on the principles that the analysis of the work has demonstrated. In previous research on Claude Cahun, the indefinite genre of the book has been emphasised. Instead, this thesis wants to show that the diversity of text genres is deliberately explored to develop varying modes of enunciation that give Claude Cahun the opporturity to reflect and give nuance to representations of the self and to convey a radical critique of society.

Drawing on Antoine Berman’s theory of translation as a critical act, this article analyzes the Swedish translation of Giovanni Verga's masterpiece I Malavoglia. The actual translation analysis therefore takes as its starting point a pre-analysis that highlights the translator’s individual motives to deviate from the source text. The results show that the Swedish translator has done extensive changes to Verga’s polyphonic novel, giving it a more homogeneous form. Drawing on theoretical ideas on the translator’s unconscious and habitus, the article shows that the translator has downplayed the novel’s expressive and vernacular traits as well as the patriarchal perspectives, emphasizing instead the novel’s religious paths.

Digital globalization is not as uniformous as one may believe. If Literatures do not all have possibilities to concern a broad audience, some categories of Literatures in minority languages still survive thanks to social media and other ways of circulation. This is the case for Innu Literature that within a community of 15.000 people in northern Québec struggles to share a life standard, traditions and values. Many writers of the First Nations use networks to reinforce the knowledge and the translation of their works. The article introduces strategies used by writers, publishing houses and autochtonous media to have a stronger echo. The first nations have capacities to survive and create forms of language and culture revitalization.

Garbage – that which is excluded, put aside, hidden, buried, taken out of sight, and rejected – isthe starting point of this paper. Approached as refuted matter, garbage circulates betweenprivate and public arenas, between centers of power and forgotten peripheries. Approached as asocial metaphor, garbage marks the limits between categories, between those things and peopleconsidered to have value, and those considered to be useless and disposable. In this paper, Idiscuss the use of language as a strategy for social positioning by analyzing some everydayinteractions taking place among women from different social classes gathered during fieldworkin Southeastern Brazil. As I show, when practiced in asymmetric interactions, these « garbagespeeches » not only classify people in terms of status and value, but also reinforce alreadyexisting differences. At focus in the present analysis are oral practices of social positioning wherestatus and social exclusion are harshly negotiated.

Garbage - that which is excluded, put aside, hidden, buried, taken out of sight, and rejected - is the starting point of this paper. Approached as refuted matter, garbage circulates between private and public arenas, between centers of power and forgotten peripheries. Approached as a social metaphor, garbage marks the limits between categories, between those things and people considered to have value, and those considered to be useless and disposable. In this paper, I discuss the use of language as a strategy for social positioning by analyzing some everyday interactions taking place among women from different social classes gathered during fieldwork in Southeastern Brazil. As I show, when practiced in asymmetric interactions, these garbage speeches not only classify people in terms of status and value, but also reinforce already existing differences. At focus in the present analysis are oral practices of social positioning where status and social exclusion are harshly negotiated.

This dissertation examines mealtime conversations between parents and children in eight Swedish and eight Italian middle class, dual-earner households, exploring the ways in which children are engaged in the cooperative construction of social order. The study is part of an international project (cf. Aronsson & Pontecorvo, 2002), coordinated with prior work in the US (cf. Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2013).

Study I explores how children’s accounts work during family dinner conversations. So called proto-accounts (laments, multiple repeats, want-statements) and varied verbal accounts are analyzed in relation to age class or prior language socialization experiences.

Study II focuses on the use of endearment terms in directive sequences between parents and children. The findings show an asymmetrical distribution of endearment terms, in that only parents make use of them when interactional problems – children’s non-compliance with parental requests in particular – arise.

Study III examines the ways in which Italian parents deploy the discourse marker dai (‘come on’) in directive sequences. This is a flexible linguistic resource that is employed by parents as a cajoling token when children fail to comply with parental requests, hindering the advancement of the in-progress activity.

This thesis describes family mealtimes as parent-directed activities where sociality, morality and local understandings of the world (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) are collaboratively re-created and enacted. This confirms the crucial role of everyday family meals as rich cultural sites (Ochs & Shohet, 2006) for reasserting moral attitudes of the family: participants learn moment by moment how to be competent actors that are able to choose between alternative courses of action and that can therefore be held accountable for their actions (Bergmann, 1998: 284). From this point of view, a dinner is paradigmatic of the deep moral sense that permeates the making of a family.

This article examines the claims made by translingual writers Nancy Huston and Andreï Makine about the literary function of the foreign language, and also analyses how the poetic potential of foreign words is thematized in their fiction. It focuses on two novels which portray artistic trajectories in search of a language distinct from the imperfect words of everyday expression, be it through a nostalgically opaque language of childhood as in Le Testament français, or through an exploration of the meeting point of music and language as in Lignes de faille. While both writers emphasize the defamiliarizing function of the foreign language which, for Huston in particular, draws attention to its material form, their novels shift the site of linguistic defamiliarization from formal linguistic innovation to bilingual perception, which is likened to a ‘magic’ of words, an ‘optical illusion’ which serves to preserve childhood wonder and sensitivity.

This study investigates the acquisition and use of metadiscourse markers in learners/users of L2 Spanish and the role these markers play in the development of fluency and conversational participation during a five-month stay in Spain as exchange students of business administration.

The study has been conducted in three steps. The first part focuses on the theory and categorization of metadiscourse markers, followed by an analysis of the use and development of these markers in learners of L2 Spanish. The second part deals with the categorization and operationalization of aspects of fluency and conversational participation that can be associated with the use of metadiscourse markers; followed by an analysis of these aspects in the performance of the learners. The third part of the study is a summary of the results obtained and a discussion of the relationship between the use of metadiscourse markers and the development of fluency and conversational participation.

The data underlying the current study consists of a selection of 17 recorded conversations between learners of L2 Spanish and native speakers of Spanish taken from the AKSAM database. The conversations belong in two activity types: discussions and simulated negotiations. The selected sample has a duration of approx. 10 hours and comprises 87 683 words. The study focuses on nine learners who have been recorded at the beginning and at the end of their five month study-abroad stay.

Results show that frequency of use of metadiscourse markers has increased considerably at the end of the stay in the majority of the learners under study. A qualitative development can also be found, through which the metadiscourse markers that characterize the learners’ L1 and/or interlanguage have been substituted by more target-like expressions. Furthermore, both their fluency and level of conversational participation have generally increased. Within this development, however, a notable individual variation can be found. The learners who show the strongest development as regards fluency and conversational participation are also found to exhibit the most salient development of metadiscourse markers. Since disfluency is reduced to a lesser degree in those participants who also exhibit a less developed use of metadiscourse markers, it is argued that the development of metadiscourse markers in the L2 learner runs parallel to the development of discourse skills, but also that acquiring an adequate use of metadiscourse markers helps developing these skills.

The present paper analyzes the occurrence of indicative and subjunctive complements of the verbs comprender (Spanish) and compreender (Portuguese) in European Spanish and European Portuguese. A quantitative analysis based on 400 occurrences of the complements randomly selected from the newspaper genre shows that the indicative mood occurs more frequently than the subjunctive mood in both languages, although the subjunctive mood is more frequent in the Portuguese corpus than in the Spanish one. The analysis also shows that the occurrence of the subjunctive complement is highly restricted to contexts in which the subject of the main clause verb is either 1st person or 3rd person singular. From the theoretical perspective of Cognitive Grammar, the mood alternation is explained by the concept of dominion, i.e. the indicative complement designates an event that is located within the conceptualizer’s epistemic dominion, whereas the subjunctive complement designates an event that is located outside the conceptualizer’s dominion of effective control.

Key accounts of morphological variability in L2 acquisition posit either deficits in the representation of abstract morphosyntactic features or the mapping between morpho-phonological forms and syntactic features due to computational limitations. This study extends previous research to L2 Italian, a richly inflected language. The production and grammatical intuitions of suppletive and affixal verb inflection were elicited from a cross-section of instructed adult L2 learners with L1 Spanish and L1 English. Although a clear production-intuition gap was found, supporting computational views, a strong regularity in the degree of variability across test conditions, L1s, and proficiency levels was also attested, supporting representational accounts. The findings suggest morphological development in L2 Italian is consistent with structure-building models that assume no L1 transfer of functional features. Imperative verb forms in L2 Italian are proposed as defaults equivalent to the bare verb forms of L2 English and non-finite defaults of L2 French and German.

NUESTRAS MADRES is an artwork by the art collective IDA performed at the AHRA Architecture and Feminisms Conference (2016), which consisted of a collective ritual and a poetry reading. The ritual created a safe space where a group of participants sat around a table taking turns in sharing their stories about their mothers while embroidering their names on a single tablecloth. These were synthesized into a poem and presented the following day. IDA investigates issues in private and public space connected to knowledge production and gender normativity. Even though the role of mothers and their knowledge is usually connected to the private sphere, the knowledge of our mothers and their mothers shared en la mesa - over the table - is important in the construction of political subjects. How has this knowledge helped us survive in society as women, queer, indigenous, working class, Muslim, immigrant - as human beings?

This paper analyzes the diffusion of contact-induced linguistic innovations in Portuguese spoken in Maputo, Mozambique, in two datasets from 1993/4 and 2007, focusing on quantitative accounts of linguistic innovations at lexical, lexico-syntactic, syntactic and morphosyntactic levels. Overall, innovative features that registered in the two datasets are qualitatively the same. Results confirm an increase in the frequency of innovative features related to second language acquisition and language contact at all linguist levels, with particularly high diffusion rates of morphological simplifications. This increase may be related to bilingualism and changes in use of, access to, and input of Portuguese. Furthermore, the qualitative stability of features may be a sign of an emerging usage norm.

This article examines how middle-class households in the city of Belo Horizonte, southeastern Brazil, deal with the waste that pervades their lives. Processes of classification and disposal are examined and related to consumption practices, the division of labor, and environmental issues. This research also examines how waste is implicated in the performance of middle class-ness, in notions of morality, and in norms and codes classifying and distinguishing the valuable from the worthless. The present study suggests that members of the ethnographic sample seem worried about issues regarding social hierarchies and class belonging, to a much greater degree than they are concerned with the environmental aspects of consumption and waste management. Out of sight, out of mind? In an explicit context of social inequality, behavior toward waste passes first through the lens of class.

Peter Artedi (1705-1735) was a Swedish doctor, naturalist, and author of Ichthyologia (Leiden 1738), a book enjoying the reputation of being a pioneering work that has never been translated into any vernacular language. This paper demonstrates Artedi's innovative and consistent method of work through a Swedish translation of his treatment of one sincle species, Clupea maxilla inferiore longiore, maculis nigris carens "Strömming" in Volumes III, IV, and V of Ichthyologia. These three instalments are compared with the article on Clupea Harengus (Linn. 1758), "Herring", authored by Sir Francis Willughby (1636-1672) and John Ray (1627-1705), both of the Royal Society of London.